There’s nothing like the first weekend of beautiful weather to raise skepticism about digitally mediated experience. Yet huddling with the explorers of sensors and video delay, remote broadcasting and haptic interfaces, as well as some of the international cadre of conceptualists of the new performance practice meant that last weekend in Boston you could see the augmented future of theater coming over the spring horizon. Eventually.

At the Boston Cyberarts Festival’s second biennial “Ideas in Motion” conference, which was held at Green Street Studios, polished artmaking took second place to discussions of the labor-draining challenge of developing and learning to manipulate all these new toys. Much of the work on display in “The Body’s Limit” was tedious. Other items reflected conceptual strategies that amounted to Merce Cunningham’s low-tech I Ching chance operations tarted up with bar-code scanners. As MIT’s Noah Riskin pointed out in the conference’s prickly closing plenary, much cyberart — visual and sonic arts included — is subtly shaped by the “grammar” of tools created for science. Too often those tools are leading the art instead of the other way around.

Which doesn’t mean that “The Body’s Limit” didn’t include moments of beauty and enlightenment. In Palinopsia, where Pauliina Silvennoinen wore a constructivist white dress, half sail, half armature, a camera crept under her skirts to broadcast images of her wriggling toes and Peter Kirn’s computer reanimated the image with poetic, painterly effects. Sarah Drury offered tape from her ongoing work with disabled artists including Cathy Weis, whom Cyberarts will present at the ICA April 28-29 in her Electric Haiku: Cool As Custard, turning signals from her sensor-equipped shoes into vectors that looked like packs of pick-up sticks.

There was direct, gorgeous movement by former William Forsythe dancer Antony Rizzi. In his inventive Every Body Tells a Story, a helium balloon attached to his back pocket stood in — first comically, then horrifyingly — for the head of a closeted high-society gay man. There were a range of video projects too, “extending the body” through digital camerawork and animation effects. Hans Beenhakker’s Shake Off, running in a loop from dusk till 2 am in Harvard Square, updates Maya Deren’s famous experimental film study of Talley Beatty, here danced by Prince Credell and a crew of digital doppelgänger. Both Rizzi and Nell Breyer provided footage that isolated body parts and mirrored them to create comical new creatures, an effect made without any technology — and without any underwear — in a Mummenschanz-like episode by Xavier Le Roy.

But throughout the weekend I repeatedly heard disclaimers: there was not enough time, not enough resources, the technology didn’t work, the piece is still in development. In the theater, the curtain goes up by 8:10, no excuses. In software, there are missed ship dates and buggy releases.

CRASHarts’ Maure Aronson made a similar disclaimer as he introduced this year’s edition of “Ten’s the Limit,” which was guest-curated by New York choreographer Robert Battle and held at the ICA. Mentioning that some of the works were still in progress — without indicating which ones he meant — kept open a window of hope for the more unbaked offerings.

Year in Dance: Reusable histories & durable trends Conservation is a good thing in these times, and some of the most interesting performances drew on the uses of history — personal history, performance history, and even some inventions that sought to overturn history.

Year in Classical: Celebrate! In Handel's Hercules, the demented Dejanira's loss is still so painful, I was afraid to listen; now I don't want to hear anything else.

Where the chips fell Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.

Love and loss Boston’s biggest classical-music story this year was also its saddest.

What’s in a phrase? There are lots of references to heaven in Bach’s Passions and cantatas, but one of his most heavenly pieces has no words at all.

Stuff at night This week’s health headlines also included the announcement from the Boston Symphony Orchestra that music director James Levine has been sidelined again, from the “excruciating pain” he’s been suffering since his surgery for a herniated disc.

In extremis In Handel’s Ariodante we move from the sunlit first act into a world of moonlight, darkness, deception, and emotional blindness.

Happy feet The architectural team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater at the new Institute for Contemporary Art as a 325-seat jewel box, its transparent walls allowing the Boston harbor and skyline to serve as a scenic backdrop or turn opaque as the performance requires.

Drama dance Half a century ago something known as dance drama occupied a large part of the modern-dance repertory.

NICOLE PIERCE WALKS THE WALK | January 16, 2013 Dance maker Nicole Pierce was working the glue gun, constructing mossy objects, papier-mâché thingamabobs and items that she could hang from a net hoisted across the Art Deco balconies of the South End's Villa Victoria Center for the Arts.